The rules of blogging

1. Don't nag about how long it's been since you last posted something.

;)

(seriously)

amazon's black hole at "'s Gravenvoeren BE"

There seems to be a black hole sucking up amazon shipments at "'s Gravenvoeren BE". I ordered a book on amazon.de last week and it still hasn't arrived. The shipment details:

Datum	Zeit	Ort	Nähere Informationen
24. November 2009	11:33	's Gravenvoeren BE	Zustellversuch
24. November 2009	11:31	's Gravenvoeren BE	Zustellversuch
24. November 2009	07:04	's Gravenvoeren BE	Zugestellt.
24. November 2009	06:34	's Gravenvoeren BE	Lieferung wird zugestellt
24. November 2009	05:04	's Gravenvoeren BE	Lieferung wird zugestellt
23. November 2009	15:56	Antwerpen BE	Lieferung ist beim Depot eingegangen.
20. November 2009	16:18	Bruxelles Brussel BE	Lieferung hat das Versandzentrum verlassen und ist unterwegs.

The shipment's destination is Gent, Belgium, which is nowhere near "'s Gravenvoeren". Also, note the bizarre inconsistency in the tracking: Zugestellt (delivered) occurs before Zustellversuch (delivery attempt).

Some more googling revealed that I am not the only one, and bizarrely, it also concerned packages with destination Gent, Belgium (although these are ordered on amazon.fr):

http://www.amazon.fr/review/R1EFSYKEUUDKWW

http://blog.volume12.net/9472.htm

UPDATE: The tracking at amazon is fundamentally broken. To track the parcel properly, you need to track it on the courier's website, which in my case was TaxiPost, the parcel service of the Belgian Post. There, it mentioned a failed delivery and the post office at which the parcel was kept. Normally, a note is left in the mailbox, but I guess they messed that up. So I went by this morning and picked it up.

Devoxx09 JDK7 update surprise: closures!

During the JDK7 update by Mark Reinhold, it was announced that closures are to be included in in JDK7 after all. Most people were happy but considered it very questionable to make this kind of decision so late in the process.

Personally I think it ties in with another important observation I made during this year's devoxx edition: Scala has become normal. A whole lot of people appear to have made the move. Scala gets attention in most of the presentations, and nobody considers it to be a novelty. If scala's adoption rate continues at the same pace, then I fear jdk7 + closures is once again going to be too little too late. The ship has sailed.

During the oracle keynote, I also paid attention to their wording regarding their promise of 'good stewardship' over the java platform, which I unfortunately have not memorized. It seemed to me that under oracle, the Java language is not going to be so much of a priority as the jvm.

I'll review when the keynote is published on parleys.com (the jdk7 update was not part of the keynote though, which it was last year. One might wonder why.)

3D Mandelbrot

sweet!

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

WINS Name Resolution for Linux

 - apt-get install winbind
 - edit /etc/nsswitch.conf:

passwd: compat winbind
group: compat winbind
shadow: compat

hosts: files wins dns mdns
networks: files

protocols: db files
services: db files
ethers: db files
rpc: db files

netgroup: nis

http://www.bensbits.com/2006/02/04/wins_name_resolution_for_linux

Running your own eclipse on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic)

In you eclipse dir do

$ mv eclipse eclipse.bin
$ touch eclipse
$ chmod a+x eclipse

And put the following in the new eclipse file

#! /bin/sh
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jni GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true $(dirname "$0")/eclipse.bin

The LD_LIBRARY_PATH is there to make the javahl svn connector work (along with sudo apt-get install libsvn-java)

The GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS is there to fix annoying behaviour that appeared in 9.10 where some window content in popups isn't refreshed and some buttons don't respond well to clicks (or not at all)

regina regina

he was perfect except for the fact that he was an engineer

Regina Spektor, Love Affair, 11:11